Shintenshin
by Phususaur
Summary: My clan's jutsu are based off of the separation of mind and body, the disassociation of the spiritual and physical, the soul and all of the gross fleshy parts that house it. It's difficult for most people to wrap their heads around these days. I like to think I'm an exception. (OC Insert, Shika-Harem (Just kidding))
1. Cognitive Dissonance

╒═══_**Shintenshin═══╕**_

∞═══╡_**Book One: Mind Walker╞═══∞**_

_**Cognitive Dissonance**_

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><p><em>Is it just me, or does Shippuden's first opening kick some serious ass. Oh – and I don't own Naruto, if I did you would see romantic subplot and abundant references to cheesy eighties action movies.<em>

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><p>Ever since I left the crib, I've been told about the importance of the separation of mind and body, spirit and physical form, soul and the living fleshy organs that reside within – it's central to most of my clan's techniques, without understanding that distinction we'd be helpless in a battle.<p>

I don't like to brag, but I think I know about the distinction of mind and body just a _little _bit better than most – as it turns out, just a little bit better than I ever wanted to. I ended up as _Ino Yamanaka_ through no coincidence, but by my own will, and I'm beginning to think that my own will did a little bit more than that. How else did everybody end up the way they did?

The brain is limited by the resonance of the synapses, the sparks that zoom through your head at around 268 miles per hour, or 12,000 centimeters per a second. Just for reference, the average human brain is 15 centimeters long, so the time it takes for a signal to reach one end to the other is 0.00125 seconds. But sometimes, when facing fate, 268 miles per hour isn't enough to register what is happening, not even nearly enough.

For instance, the time it took me to attempt to stop my best friend's suicide was astronomical. The 100 milliseconds it took for the sight to register in my brain, the half a second it took to rush towards them to slap the alcohol laced with a liberal amount of pills away from them. It all took to long, and I'm the reason she died that day. That, and her manic depression, but who am I to blame her brain for this – it's lack of forethought that kills people.

If my brain hadn't been addled by alcohol that day my reaction would have been faster, maybe her problem wouldn't have been as urgent, and maybe I wouldn't have ended up dead trying to save her. But then, where would I be now? Where would she be, for that matter?

I like to think, actually, that it wasn't my lack of foresight that killed her seeing as I'm a new person now, literally and metaphorically, but the guilt hits me sometimes all the same.

"_I'm going to go up to bed for a little while." _she said at the time. A blatant lie if I ever saw one, I know for a fact constant fatigue is a sign of depression, the study of human psychology is something that has remained constant from the last life to this one. I didn't see it, or if I did, I turned a blind eye.

We all died that day... well, most of us. I'm not sure what happened still myself, but doubting it will get me nowhere. All I know now is that one day I was Katherine, the next I was dead, and the next after that I was... well... let's say that the first time I was squeezed through the uterus of another woman was enough, even without me being cognizant the first time.

Before I was Ino I was Katherine, and as much as it pains me to think about everybody from back then, it's all part of my training. I need to realize that I can't possibly be both... but it's getting to me, and if I'm not either then...

It's best not to walk that road, but I have to, for my friend's and my sake. I just wish someone would give me the answers. Shika was right about thinking, in hindsight. Using my brain like this gives me a headache that is a bit _too _troublesome.

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><p><em>The room quieted down nearly ten minutes after she went upstairs, and it was decided, sober or not, that April was clearly the life of any party. The rest of my friends decided to head out – it was my house after all, but April was their driver, and she had just headed to sleep.<em>

_Had they decided to leave a minute earlier, maybe..._

"_Hey, Katherine!" one of my friends said "Go tell April to get her ass down here. I'm probably too drunk to walk up the stairs."_

_At one point he had charcoal lines on his face, like a football player, but two drinks and a few games that I don't feel comfortable talking about ended up smudging them into two blob-ish things on his cheeks. They looked kind of triangle-y and... oh, right, I should walk up the stairs._

_The steps seemed too small for my feet, and I stumbled dangerously for a few seconds before making it to the top._

_I knock on the door once. "April?" Once again "April, come out of there, the others are leaving."_

_The door swings open, and my mind begins to register things, and then I begin to run, and then I begin to scream "April!" and I'm not nearly fast enough and is that an empty bottle of pills and 'oh-fuck' how many did she take and was that alcohol! And... and..._

"_ROSE GET YOUR ASS IN THE BUILDING!" I shout, carrying April down the stairs at speeds probably not good for one so intoxicated._

_I hear a shocked gasp and the sound of feet running back inside – the commotion I caused bringing the rest of my friends into the building. The petite girl (and the only one of us studying to become an RN, god bless her soul,) was moving faster than a freight train with a panicked look on her face._

_We look to April who was on the ground. Her pupils were dilated, her light blue eyes glazed over some – why did it seem like it was always going to end up this way, the only conclusion? I desperately try to stave off the panic attack as Rose attends to her._

_After registering her pulse, Rose spoke. "Shit... this is bad. Has anyone called the poison control center?"_

"_It appears the line is busy, Rose." One of my other friends spoke, shifting his round sunglasses._

"_How does that even work? It's the poison control center, it should be equipped to handle multiple calls." I ask, and we all take a second of silent consideration before cursing. "Whatever, I'll drive, we need to bring her to the hospital stat."_

_Rose picks up April hastily, with all the coordination I would expect from her after a party. At the very least she's the heaviest drinker out of all of us, so she was the least affected when it came to the one or two drinks we shared. Still, she stumbles on the door, and is a little off balance._

_I slide into the driver's seat of the car, Rose takes the passenger's seat. (The others weren't to amused when she called shotgun). My family van wasn't the most fuel efficient vehicle to drive to a hospital, nor the fastest, but it was the only thing that could comfortably fit 7 people and a stretcher._

_My boyfriend sat in the seat behind me, and looked to be struggling for words. "What can I say... confusing... annoying... unexpected?" He asks._

_I giggle, despite the situation. "How about all of those at once: Troublesome."_

"_Yeah, troublesome – that fits just superbly. Troublesome manic depression, troublesome poison control center, and a troublesome-fucking-car. I should say that more often, it's a very versatile word. That, and, trying to think of a different response each time would be... troublesome I guess." His slender form slouches into the car seat, the amount of alcohol we all had being a bit too much to take standing._

_The collective groan in the car almost lightened the mood. "Lazy bastard." I say light-heartedly "You're the one that should be driving, but I guess you love the couch a bit too much for that."_

_He slumps even further into his chair and involuntarily hiccups, as if to rub it in that I'm wrong._

_The mood is somber in the car when we finally manage to get the stretcher in and pull out of the driveway. Maybe if they stayed behind they would be happier, but they all insisted on coming with me. Who was I to argue, I'm probably the one of us most at fault, it happened in my own house._

_I stifle a very cruel laugh when I thought about the child-proof cap on that bottle of pills. I can just imagine a little April pouting as she tries to open it – something I'm sure she wouldn't have been able to do if she was even slightly intoxicated. Speaking of which, maybe we would have noticed what was wrong if she hadn't been the one who insisted on staying sober._

_I pulled on to the highway at higher speeds than I should have been going, but I didn't care because I thought I was just sober enough to drive properly. Brushing my bang out of the way of my eye, I switch to autopilot. Check the rear-view mirror. Look out window, toggle high beams, there's another car approaching. Hey, that's actually a pretty big car, and why is it in my lane. No wait... why am I in it's lane?_

"_SHIT!" I swerve to the right sharply, but it's not enough to avoid the eighteen-wheeler that happens to be going in the complete opposite direction. There's a loud crash, and the pain, lots of pain._

_Laying outside the wreck of the car, I look at Rose's pink hair and outfit, and my mind drifts to some fitting last thoughts. Rose's hair, which she dyed pink after cutting and donating it, was yet another sign of something we had been wondering for a while. She was diagnosed of breast-cancer at an early age, and something in the process permanently messed her up – her lack of assets despite her clearly hormonally induced temper shows something must have went wrong._

_But my mind wasn't on her breasts, it was studying the blood around her, slowly pooling into the cracks on the concrete – noticing something else distinct. Yes, she had breast cancer at a young age, but despite that tragedy she didn't die that day. Cancer wasn't what killed her._

_I did._

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><p>And that's all I've got, folks! Thanks for reading, don't be afraid to review, and make sure to check for new updates regardless.<p>

Thrice Underneath's second chapter was put on hiatus because of a small hardrive crash and school starting. Damn Freshmen year's eating up all my free time, and I thought I would be sailing through classes by now.

If you couldn't tell, this is not actually a self-insert, mostly because my name is not Katherine. Rather, I wanted to write an idea centered around the Ino-Shika-Chō trio that was slightly AU, and then I thought: What's the best excuse to make Ino a slightly manipulative possession sue? Yamanaka's jutsu center around the mind, so reincarnation it was.

I promise Ino will look more like Ino in the next chapter, even if she has to Obfuscate Stupidity like it's nobody's business.

This will have a different theme than _Thrice Underneath. _Instead of the general SI theme that _D__é__j__à__ vu no Jutsu _and _Dreaming of Sunshine _have, _Shintenshin_ will have a theme of "progress", much like that of _Destiny is a Hazy Thing_, _Look to the Stars_, and god forbid _Chunin Exam Day _have.

Will Ino ever understand what the hell happened to her? Is Rose an expy of Sakura? (the answer is yes) Did the plot bunnies attack me viscously in my sleep? Find out all of this and _more_ in the next harrowing chapter of _Shintenshin_!

Sincerely,

Everybody's favorite nonexistent dinosaur,

Phususaurus


	2. Melancholic Resonance

╒═══ _**Shintenshin ═══╕**_

∞═══╡_**Book One: Mind Walker╞═══∞**_

_**Melancholic Resonance**_

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><p><em>Just as a side effect of chronic depression is sadness, a side effect of insanity just happens to be a killer sense of humor.<em>

_09/21/14: Revised to spread out the mind-fuckery over a manageable scale. To new readers, yes, it was worse before hand._

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><p>As I was on the ground, my mind was on overdrive. <em>Grasp a hold of reality, <em>I thought, desperately struggling against my slipping consciousness. _Expand, become aware, I can't lose now, I need to understand..._ And my brain hurt, like it was straining against a barrier.

Everything sort of just... blinked out all at once, and the next thing I know I'm facing the boundaries of lucidity. I never feel the bliss of sleep, the empty ocean of consciousness, just my mind, being foggy and shrouded, blocked and restrained. My mind stopped working, for a second, and I might have actually died for a little while.

It was odd, floating in empty space like that. My thoughts were suspended, except for one thing, a desire, a morbid curiosity, it could by called. There was nothing except the urge to explore, to taste what just seems so close yet out of reach. _I need to go deeper._

I retreat within my mindscape, reifying the abstract of thought to make the world of my brain make some semblance of sense. And in the shifting madness of my brain near death, only one thing was constant. A murky brown pond that seemed so deep it was nearly endless – and the only way further was to dive down, to dive to the depths of the soul and see what was inside.

I broke down several barriers as I swam, each as unpleasant as the last, and I saw each and every thing that has caused me discomfort, and the aversion to that discomfort, and the shame and the loneliness even when I had friends. It was all released in to the shifting world of my mind, but I did not and could not care. _I need to reach out._

Entering the soulscape and looking at the root of my being was like being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste, if you replaced "toothpaste" with me, and "tube" with spiky coffin of death.

The world of the soul could not be perceived, the one construed dimension wrapping around like a string of nerve endings, signals bent from one end of the other. Time stopped, and there was only intent. It felt as if I was trapped in an unrefined iron cage, always shifting and stopping in fractal patterns, surrounding and pressing me on all sides.

I understood the cage that was the border between my reality and my fantasy and becoming truly aware, what I _really _saw when I read stories and lost myself in tales and myth. My consciousness couldn't break through the barrier.

And for the first time since I was a little girl, I felt small again, I realized the extent of how much I wasn't aware of, and the overwhelming desire to grow into something more.

I turn around – no, I don't turn around, I feel the illusion of turning, as if I'm looking at something that's not there, or I'm reading the words from a page of a book. The floral cage looks like a simple wall, but I'm only aware of one segment of it blocking my path to omniscience, like the rest of the cage simply doesn't exist... even though I know I'm surrounded on all sides by my mental approximation of walls. My brain feels as if it operates on only one dimension, the gate forward, death backward.

Dreams are an illusion, an image to trick the soul. An image to inspire more dreams of freedom... but they have the potential to lead to something so much more. The soulscape is the reality of the mind, the truth behind perception, that can't be understood... unless, it can...

_No. I will understand, I will move beyond the cage._

I mutter something in a language I don't actually know, as if...

Every action I take feels fake, as if each deliberate attempt to move is restricted, and no matter which way I try and turn my head, I see the gate in the way.

In the cage there are eight locks that seem to shift in directions that don't exist in the one dimensional world I'm in, and what was weirder is that one appeared to be unlocked... The foreign words slip out of my head again, stifled by the blood in my throat.

_How do I get around this? _My flowing thoughts struggle to cohere in a sentence, and if I focus too much on the words I can feel the gate wavering. Everything in the world tells me to sleep, it's what I've always done when faced with this choice, just as everyone has. Another part of me realizes I can choose to wake up, but that's too obvious... if I wake up, there's still a gate here, and all of my friends are gone.

Words slip out of my mouth for the sixth time, and they hurt my torn vocal chords. _When did I tear my vocal chords?_ I want to scream, but my mind still can't move in any direction. I can feel my sweat, the only water I feel in the world, clinging desperately to my skin even while in my mind.

And suddenly, my friends are with me, standing right next to me – aware, even though I can't see them. I feel myself on the boundary of dreams, trapped in the locked gate, and steadily breathing on the pavement as the sound of ambulances arrive. Then I feel something coming, a key out of this mess – a compulsion – no, _duty, _to go further_._

My muscles tear at my nerves, every bone in my body aching, and the eight piece key to the gate is almost complete. _I want to understand! I want to remember! I want to be free! And most of all... I want to live!_

I can feel the blood pouring from a chest wound just above my heart, the prickling of my fingers from lack of oxygen, the pavement on the side of my face. My eyes flutter open, but they cannot see, and I utter a words that have no meaning to me, for I have already seen and glimpsed in the a world beyond the gate, a mind of two dimensions.

"_Gate of Death: OPEN!"_

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><p>I dream like I have never dreamed before, with no anchor or tie. I don't feel consciously aware of my body resting, but then again, I don't feel anything.<p>

The time in the dream is still shattered, and everything is happening all at once and never at all, like always in the world of dreams, but if I focus my thoughts in one direction the thoughts will take me there. There was no experience and every experience, for the instant I was asleep I knew my mind-scape thoroughly, though it was the only thing I knew.

And then, I was awake, and my mind was brought back on line. Things happened in three dimensions, time passed as the clock ticked, and the scream of a baby was brought to my ears.

The scream and cry sounded alien, even though I knew it was my own. The entire... world... felt off, actually, like my was experiencing it for the first time. It was humbling, it brought me back to reality, and like the water settles after rain, my thoughts began to flow back into a stream of consciousness. And I broke the surface of the bubble that had surrounded me in a haze ever since that first bottle of alcohol, and I _woke up._

The first order of business: Where am I, Why do I sound like a baby, Who is Ino Yamanaka, and _what the bloody-FUCK just happened?_

Breath in. Breath out. Blink.

Ugh... Ok, so the first two questions I can answer, I guess. If I think back to when I first woke up...

"_What's her name?" A pretty lady's voice spoke up, with the sound of professionalism to it. She's speaking the language I don't know – the very same that I think I spoke in during "The Mindfuck" earlier. It sounds reminiscent of Japanese, in a twisted sort of way, but I know Japanese... this only bears a passing resemblance to it. Which begs the question, why do I understand it?_

"_We're thinking of calling her Ino. Ino Yamanaka." Oh hey, that must be me... but you don't just rename a person every day. Coupled with the baby's crying, and the raw feeling of my skin, I was probably just born, which makes no sense whatsoever._

"_After her father, eh?" Wait, they named me after a guy? Well, shit._

I'm transferred to someone else's hands, likely my mother's. I hear her playing with me, but I tune it out, trying to focus my other senses.

My eyes feel, weird, and I can't see out of them. In fact, all forms of perception are weirded out. The only thing I can do is hear and tell direction – and that feels like a stretch, because I don't think I am actually hearing through my ears, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

I retreat within my mindscape, reifying the abstract of thought, and look upon something that has become so dreadfully familiar to me. _I gaze upon the abstraction which makes mortal men mad. _Not pressed for time or energy this, I can observe and investigate whatever the hell happened to me closely.

My eyes work in my mindscape, which is unsurprising, but for some reason everything still seems... off. I can tell what it is, but I can't see it... though something seems to be nudging my perception in the right direction.

I look (though it doesn't feel like looking at all) straight forward, and something in my mind screams "Tree" even though what I'm looking at looks absolutely nothing like a tree. See... for reference, I can even try and drudge up another old memory about what a tree looks li-

My perception clears, and I'm seeing a tree, but from a different angle... or... dimension. It's clearly a tree now, but half of myself can clearly picture a tree and it doesn't look anything like that. Like the Not-Japanese from earlier, or hearing without hearing, things after being (re)born don't seem to affect my perception, like the rules are different here.

My mindscape takes the shape of a pond in a hilly plain, surrounded by mountains, a location I've never been before. It's homely, and the tall grass is cut at the bank of the pond forming a nice little mat where I can sit and peer into it's depths. Not entirely interesting, but then again, it's my mindscape.

What does catch my interest is the pond itself. It seems like it's endless depths will take me deeper into my mindscape, into something more sinister. The pond's reflections seem like a reflection of my inner thoughts, swirling around in a mass of confusion and generally not resembling a pond, but nothing in here resembles what it is in the least.

In fact, I'm just going to go ahead and stop describing the anti-perception from now on. My head hurts too much to think on these things.

I stop and step by the pond, and take a calming breath. It's been forever since I could _feel _breathing, which is so great you don't even know it. Speaking of, how long have I been dead?

Even if all of my friends are dead, (by the way, remind me later to find a reasonable place to curse up a storm about that clusterfuck) there's still stuff I can do, right. I can make new friends, even if it hurts me to even think about my deceased ones.

My brain whirs for a second, and my mindscape shrouds itself in thought, and then everything became so completely obvious it hurt.

_Oh shit. No... there's just no fucking way... I'm on earth, right... same universe, maybe same time? Please?... With cherries on top? Being reborn is bad enough._

Like I said, now everything makes sense. The whacked up perception... I literally have never stepped foot in this universe, I'm lucky the rules are similar enough that my sanity stayed mostly intact. I'm lucky I'm even here, seeing as the last sensible thing I remember doing is dying.

Everything I'm seeing... the trees are still trees, the pond is still a pond, just through extra-dimensional eyes.

That would explain everything. I wasn't reborn, I entered an alternate dimension perpendicular to the one I call home, and in that alternate dimension I was just being born.

Just to be sure, I peer in the pond, and look at my reflection. In my mindscape, I'm clearly not a baby, but if my mind is a physical construct then my reflection in my mind would be a reflection of the me from this universe.

And... if I just peer over into the pond a little bit to see my reflection... _oh shit twice! _I'm _hot! _I've got to be at least a twelve and a half! Granted, I look nearly identical to how I did in the other world, but a girl can dream, right?

My hair still droops over my right eye, and my left eye is still the dominant eye even though I'm right-handed, but my hair is a yellowish blond. Kind of like... _no, don't think about him... _I can't think about my friends right now... especially not the little bundle of energy. Thinking about him is giving me a headache... or maybe wrapping my head around another dimension is... maybe both? My eyes lack the pupil I've grown used to having, which is confusing and paradoxical, but it doesn't matter. Instead of brown, my eyes are a bluish color.

My skin is paler, but other than that... I feel like the same person trapped in some kind of cage.

So now only one really pressing question needs to be answered. _Where does the pond go?_

I dive into the pond, which looks an awful lot like my left eye – now that I think about it –, and swim downward at a record pace, only to break through the surface again.

My brain shifts perception, and I crawl onto the bank breathing in familiar air. It's the same mindscape, only the world is red-shifted and a slow deathly hollow breeze is running through it. If I focus enough, I can hear the steady beat of a broken heart in time with the beat of an ECG, trees rattling with the shaky intake of breath forced in by a respirator.

_This is my universe, this is my home..._ but something tells me I can't go back, not quite yet. My friends are gone, and there's no bringing them back, there's nothing holding me home right now. I take one longing glance around, at the total disaster everything has turned into, and dive into my mind once again, to the pond in between worlds. The mental representation of a portal to another side.

My mind adjusts again to the change in rules of the universe almost automatically by now, thankfully.

It's weird. Up until this point in my life I always pictured waking up today with a headache, but the headache was from the alcohol, not... whatever the fuck is going on right now.

I consider, if only for a second, staying in my mindscape to see what falling asleep looks like, but I've had enough mindfucks today thank-you-very-much. I stop struggling against my current of thoughts, and my personality feels much more in tact than I thought it was.

_No shit sherlock. I'm still myself, the only thing I'm lacking is a fucking cold shower and a glass of water and it'd be any other post-party cleanup._

Yep, that thought was definitely me, if a bit annoyed. Everything is totally in tact, which means I won't look too much like a psycho in public, if there is a public in the universe I'm in now. Now all I need to worry about is staying alive, and understanding what happened to me. I still haven't pieced the puzzle together.

I deny the fiction of my mindscape, and enter the realm of the living.

* * *

><p><em>Ino Yamanaka <em> is a young girl of the age of two and a half-months, and she is bored out of her mind. _Katherine Marks_ is a young woman of 23 and two and a half-months, and she shares that sentiment, and in fact, she also shares that identity, but what does that matter. It's me and me against the universe, and this _fucking _crib.

I open my mouth and make some baby sounds at my father, who seems to be intent on keeping watch today, despite his usual duties doing... _something_. At least the laws of physics in this universe seem to be consistent.

"Ino, the bars of the crib are not for chewing." He says in a doting and amused voice.

I glare and speak from another dimension to fuck with his head, which is surprisingly hard to do without teeth. "Yeah, you try being locked up for hours, _bastard._"

He doesn't seem surprised in the least that I opened my mouth and made noise, probably because it probably sounded like baby gibberish to him. In fact, he seemed kind of proud that I would imitate him. I flip him off, but the gesture doesn't seem to mean anything in this dimension.

At the very least as an adult your enemies acknowledge you! This crib is like a little prison cell because they don't trust me not to break something, but to be fair, _of course _I would break something, they've kept me locked up for so long it's only adequate revenge.

Earlier today, I actually received my first clue as to what the hell my dad does for a living. Mom walked in all panic-y and stuff, and said "Inoichi! There's been a prison breakout! The Hokage requires your presence!"

My dad then jumped out the window, leaving a knife he was toying with behind.

He _jumped _out the window. The _window!_ And what's a Hokage? It means "Fire-Shadow" in English, roughly... but they said it as if it was a position of authority. You know, capital-H proper noun "Hokage".

What kind of person goes by the alias "Fire-Shadow"? Is my dad some kind of evil henchman or something? Am I the daughter of an evil henchman? And then he goes and jumps out the window like a psycho, and nobody bats a fucking eyelash.

"Urggh." I moan, and bang my head on the bars of the crib.

"Ino?" My father says in a concerned tone. As if I could answer. "Are you alright?"

I wave my hand dismissively, even though I'm only two months old, and then lay back down. I conduct my nightly ritual of testing the limits of my mind to stave off boredom, though even that doesn't get very many results.

I think, not for the first time, that I may be a bit over my head while trying to observe the secrets of the universe.

_This is going to take a while_.

* * *

><p>And that's all I've got, folks!<p>

My head still hurts from writing the first section, so if I see a single review complaining, just think about the sanity I had to sacrifice to write that bit of garbage.

Again, there is a reason behind everything here, I just need to write it out. I'm really exited about this one, actually, and this is just one of several mindfuck chapters to come. Yes, this stuff can be used as a power-up later on, but it's only fair seeing as Ino had to liberally sacrifice her sanity to even get to this point. Right now, even I'm wondering what crap I'm going to pull later on in the story, even though I already know, it's just that mind blowing.

_Poppy Grave Dreams _gets the respect of being the first reviewer, and he didn't even comment "First!", which is a plus side. Remember, attention inflates my ego, and an inflated ego makes a more confident writer.

This was the required mindfuck chapter, like the prologue in _Destiny is a Hazy Thing_, necessary for the sake of the plot, but crazy nonetheless. It'll be a little bit saner in the next chapter. A little bit.

I'm almost certain these AN's are just to inflate my word count, but you guys love me enough to read these, right?

Right?

Sincerely,

Everybody's favorite made up word,

Phususaurus

(PS. Somebody remind me later to tell you the story behind my username, it's actually pretty funny.)


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